[OSM-talk] Nominatim & US places

[Kurt Roeckx]

On Mon, Jan 03, 2011 at 03:24:34PM -0600, Toby Murray wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 3:12 PM, Kurt Roeckx <kurt at roeckx.be> wrote:
> > Having a node to indicate the center of a town/city/... can be
> > useful too, even if you already have a boundary for it.
> 
> It seems like duplicate information to me. Like mapping a walmart with
> both a building outline tagged as a shop and a point in the middle
> tagged the same way. What do you define as the "center" of a town? If
> it is just the centroid of the border polygon then this can be
> determined from the boundary. If you mean the central business
> district or town hall, then that should be mapped appropriately with
> landuse and building polygons.

The center is ussually a market place or the church or something
like that.  It's ussually where the oldest building are and the
rest was build around it.  It has nothing to do with the centre
of the admin level boundary, but might be the center of one
of the various landuses.  It's the place where I expect the
name of the place to be on the map.  It's not always a very
specific place, but ussually a rather small area.

The lowest mapped admin level might have several places in it
which each their own name, and the lowest admin level is
one of those.  And it's not always possible to map lower
admin levels.


Kurt